So if I publish a book through amazon i get to keep 30% of the profit, but if i make an smart phone app i get to keep 70% of what i sell. seems a little lopsided. I dont think that the tech / operating cost for books publishing is much different than an app store.

So if I publish a book through amazon i get to keep 30% of the profit, but if i make an smart phone app i get to keep 70% of what i sell. seems a little lopsided. I dont think that the tech / operating cost for books publishing is much different than an app store.

And if you just sell it on your own website, you get o keep 100% of the profit. So obviously Amazon are being evil, how dare they take a cut?

It's all well and good that Amazon charges a listing fee of $0, but this is, as recent articles have pointed out, producing quite a bit of crap spam. It's not the least bit "democratic" to enable anyone to post books for free if genuine creative books are drowned out by spammed crap, keeping anybody from ever actually seeing the content.

I don't see a $10 listing fee as being that much of a deterrent for someone that has actually produced a real book (think of the value of the number of hours that go into even a short book), and a big deterrent to those that produce worthless spam.

If the volume of spam is the issue, a $1 fee ought to just about be enough, right? Maybe even 10 cents. I'd think anything that relies on bulk fails about as soon as there's any charge at all. Might as well keep those barriers as minimal as possible, right?

That's actually exactly what makes it "democratic". Of course, their need to be good tools to support it. There can be 1 million bad books on a subject that are just spam books which should all be reviewed badly and rarely purchased, as long as the 1 that is reviewed well and purchased often shows up at the top of the list when you search. You need a good Google-esque algorithm to try to filter out the crap. Oh sure, just like with Google people will try to beat the algorithm, but cream will rise to the

And how are books with worthy content noticed within the sea of crap? Barring advertising (which in this case comes directly out of the author's pocket), the only way I can see a book standing out based entirely on its contents merit is in a niche field, like the Ubuntu books in the example, where there are few enough books that ones of high quality rise to the top quickly as there is little competition.

However, in any more general areas / genres (for example, literary fiction), the sea of crap is so large that worthy content takes much longer to recognize. A lower initial momentum means lower ratings and a much lower chance to succeed in the market as a whole.

The only way to guarantee worthy work to rise above the crap is to guarantee each book a test audience--allowing it to launch with several Amazon reviews and be seeded according to an aggregate measure of quality. Otherwise, whether or not worthy content is noticed is pure luck made less likely the more crowded the market becomes.

And what's wrong with this? You are not guaranteed success, even if you have a superior product. You can write the most fantastic novel in the history of the world, but that doesn't mean you automatically get fame & fortune bestowed upon you. You still have to market it & sell it to your audience. If your marketing strategy is "publish on Amazon, sit back, and wait for the $$$ to roll in", well, good luck with that. Maybe it'll work. And maybe I'll win the lottery one day. Yay for games of chanc

To my mind, it would appear that setting up a website which is susceptible to the same problem as email regarding spam is not a good thing. Inevitably, that means some sort of filtering - whether it's natural filtering effected by charging everyone for the privilege of selling their items or some sort of algorithm looking for spam and automatically discarding it.

Amazon does not simply "promote" and market goods and services. They get PAID to promote and market goods and services... and paid quite well. The fact that you don't understand this shows a complete ignorance of the industry. User reviews may push you up in a list of similar products, but you still have to be seen first. How many click through's do you think you would get on the 50th result page from Google?

Well, that's were you do exactly what the PR=B$ advertising agencies do and pay people to pretend they like it. How much you pay will depend upon the illusory 'celebrity' value of those people created by the same PR=B$ advertising agencies. Those people, basically a pack of pathetic liars willing to put their name to any product, will of course suck a proportion of their gullible fans into buying your product and from there if it is any good word of mouth will spread. Of course if it is crap like the major

Bullshit. There are people "publishing" 50-100 "books" a day that are utter garbage. And I don't mean that it's bad writing, I mean that it's rip off recycled crap. There's so much junk flooding the market that it makes actual works indistinguishable from everything else. The only way these works get found out is if someone actually pays for it and reads it, and then bothers to comment. Even a $1 entry fee would do wonders to limit this. The WHOLE POINT of Amazon is it's ability to find products and see reviews before you buy. If you can no longer do that, then why not take your legitimate work and use the rest of the free web for self advertizing, serve the file yourself, and keep 100% of the profits?

Content doesn't rise to the top because it's "worthy", it rises to the top because it has positive reviews. Whether those reviews came from adoring fans or solid marketing is almost irrelevant.

Google is successful because it has managed to hold onto being the premiere search engine and then selling the keywords that it sees are the most popular. "Word of mouth" has literally almost *nothing* to do with it.

By "reading reviews" you mean in regard to ebooks, certainly, but SOMEONE is going to be first and is going to have to fork over the stupid $.99 to find out if what the author claims is super amazing awesome ZOMG!.. is really just crap. It gets more complicated because the author can log in with

That's because they only have to pay for the hosting once (or once a month/year/whatever) and not by the hit. How many spammers would stay in business if they were charged $1 per email address they spammed?

I'm not talking about email spammers, rather the sites with bot-written text on every subject imaginable, set up solely to attract hits from Google. Hosting bills for that sort of thing are substantial and recurring, and at that level are usually charged by traffic volume (a few cents per GB adds up when you're sucking up millions of hits) yet they still manage to make money...

I have been seeing a string of complaints in forums dedicated to retro computing where new comers to programming on their retro platform of choice have gone to buy books off Amazon only to find that all they have ended up purchasing are copy and paste jobs from the various wikis out there on the internet. A lot of times, they haven't even bothered doing any editing of the text.

It has caused me to be more cautious before purchasing anything off Amazon, especially those items in the sub $5 area. Having said t

We aren't just talking about a poorly-written story, or maybe copies of some government documents usefully collected together, or eHow putting together article compendiums.

Most of the spam this article (and the other articles) have been referring to have been one of the following:

1) Somebody else's articles, posts, e-books, etc. Copied entirely without attribution or compensation to the original author.2) Public domain works where the "editor" did a really bad job copying it over, and where there are other

a homeless man could scrounge together an extra $10 in a day or two. if $10 is a problem for you, here's a hint: it's not the marketplace screwing you. you're just an idiot.

i can't imagine any book i'd care to read where a $10 listing fee broke its publication. it's an almost-perfect filter, actually: "i only want to see books in which the author has invested so much time that $X is irrelevant to him."

X=10 is on the very permissive side... hell, it's recouped within 15 sales.:-/

well, to start with, they probably won't have kindles and anyway someone could start a market tailored for their region (presumably, spammers won't target the dirt-poor and/or there would be other signals of quality that could be used).

the developed world can mostly afford to have a $10 cap as a "first-step" signal of quality/commitment, and the amazon store is for the developed world.

Sure in the US they could, what about elsewhere in the world where 10 bucks is half a month's salary?

If you only earn $20 a month, I don't think getting your book on Amazon is going to be high up the list of life's priorities. You'll be concentrating more on things like "how do I feed and clothe my family".

Well said. It is nice to hear from someone with a good product, rather than losers who feel somehow entitled to sales of their shite.

If it is good it will sell*.>

Yes, and that's why Windows is the best operating system ever made. The free market is always right.

And don't bother saying "but Microsoft are teh evil and distorted the free market system by their illegal methods". That just proves the point that the free market is a theoretical ideal, not a description of reality.

If their content is worthy, it will rise above the crap. Fortunes have been made in simply indexing data and making it relevant, how is this any different? Please stop trying to artificially limit the marketplace to what YOU deem market worthy.

If you are a consistent libertarian, you can't argue against the right of spammers to spam their shit, but obviously the market will sort everything out just right.

Did he just criticize the idea of a ten dollar listing fee as a barrier to entry for reducing spam?

No way. Maybe for a booklet you'd want it to be less, but if you put one *thousandth* of the amount of time and effort into a book that any decent author does, five or ten bucks for the book listing is much less than that. A listing fee is not, realistically, a barrier to entry.

From TFA, it looked like a per-book listing fee--discourage spamming by making there be an incentive not to publish 10,000 similar books, since each one will net less than the $10 in profit, but any work someone actually is remotely serious about they can be expected to pay ten bucks.

Yes he did, and his only justification for that (IMO ridiculous) position is:

They suggest Amazon charge a listing fee for each book — perhaps $10 or $20. [...] This would be a huge shame. Through things like KDP and CreateSpace, Amazon is making proper publishing truly democratic and accessible to all. To get a Kindle eBook on sale, all you need is a computer with a word processor. That’s it. You don’t need up-front fees. You don’t need to be a publisher. You don’t need technical knowledge.

Who has a computer, word processor, and the time to write a serious book, but not $10? Amazon could even take the $10 out of the first $10 of profit for each book if this entry fee would otherwise demonstrably be a barrier to serious writers.

Amazon could even take the $10 out of the first $10 of profit for each book if this entry fee would otherwise demonstrably be a barrier to serious writers.

That would be a much better way of doing it, or just saying that they won't pay royalties on a book until it's made at least a certan number of dollars. I believe they currently only pay royalties when all books on an account have made some number of dollars, but if you're spamming 10,000 junk books then that won't stop you.

Interesting, because the spammers are making money by putting out 1000 useless "books" that may only get downloaded 3 times each before people catch on and post negative reviews. But that's still 3000 "sales" at $0.70 each (70% profit), or $2,100. But if Amazon absorbed the first $10 of *each book*, the spammers would get nothing and the industry would be a far better place. Of course, that will encourage comment whoring, but that's nothing new to the system.

Could we have two levels of kindle store?One that is published without barriers (the current free one) and one that has the $10 fee. As long as buyers could filter appropriately then the reader can make the choice.

Side note: I'm currently "publishing" my first novel attempt on my blog a tiny section at a time. I have considered publishing it under the Kindle scheme but don't want to be lost in the flood of crud. I'd happily pay $50 never mind 10 to get it published in even a barely reputable place; but I do

I think I understand what you're for. I imagine the no-barrier store would just get completely filtered by most people, kind of defeating the purpose of making publishing possible to anyone--even those who don't have $10 for an entry fee. (I maintain no serious author fits that category, but suppose some do.) Establishing an entry fee now wouldn't help filter current spam, unfortunately, but maybe if new spam stopped appearing,

I love how you have to fork over 65% of the revenue to Amazon. I think that number should be flipped. The author is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon is just providing the platform through which it sells. Hell, they don't even market the product. They just put it on their platform and everything else is automatic.

This notion that tradition publishers "keep" the vast majority of proceed is nonsense.

Uh, we're talking about ebooks. On Amazon.

If you're a typical traditionally published author, the publisher will get 70% of the cover price from Amazon for each ebook they sell, and then they'll give 25% of that to you, and then you'll give 15% of that to your agent. So the publisher will get more than three times as much money from each ebook sale as you do.

This notion that tradition publishers "keep" the vast majority of proceed is nonsense.

Uh, we're talking about ebooks. On Amazon.

If you're a typical traditionally published author, the publisher will get 70% of the cover price from Amazon for each ebook they sell, and then they'll give 25% of that to you, and then you'll give 15% of that to your agent. So the publisher will get more than three times as much money from each ebook sale as you do.

So don't use a traditional publisher if you're that fucking bothered. No one's forcing you.

As someone who has written several books (ok, shameless self-promoting link to the latest one [javascriptstepbystep.com]) I might suggest that you raise the price. Sound counterintuitive? People may be looking at your book and the price point of $0.99 and thinking "this might be a scam or reprint of some material already on the web." By raising the price to say $9.99 or $14.99 you're still below the traditionally published books but also give the appearance of extra value; the consumer is getting something valuable.

I know nothing of the self-publishing world, though I have considered it at various times. But if I was going to be publishing something for Kindle I'd likely be setting it at a higher price point to give my book separation from the spam.

Oh, typically royalties are in the 8% to 15% range for tech books, depending on the publisher and the deal being offered. The royalties are sometimes higher on the eBook versions. However, realize that the royalties are off of the wholesale price not the list or sale price. So if retail on JavaScript Step by Step is $39.99, Amazon has it for $25, but the publisher sold it to them for $20, I get a percentage of the $20 not of the $39.99.

Bravo. I'm a voracious reader, I prefer reading on E-ink, and I've read quite a few self-published stories for free or very cheap ($4). Some are very good stories, some are weaker, but without exception so far all are marred by poor flow, sentences that not quite work and even grammatical and spelling errors. A good copy-editor could work wonders, an editor who is involved in the shaping of the book is even better. It takes a good author to write a compelling story or a good non-fiction book, but to end up with a good final result you need professionals somewhere down the line.

This doesn't mean that self-publishing is inherently bad, if you write a good story you can rise above the rest by spending something like $1500 to have a professional copy-edit your book. If you're serious about your writing this is not a huge investment, especially if you compare it to the time you put into writing your story. And no, your friend who got an A+ in $language is almost certainly *not* a good substitute.

I love to see a lot of promising fresh writers being able to publish their work without needing a publishing contract, but even an ace racing driver can't win without his team of mechanics and support crew. Something similar goes for writers (-1, car analogy).

Disclaimer: I've worked at an academic publishing company since 1999 and have participated in publishing hundreds of works. I *know* how important a good editor, proof-reader and copy-editor are for getting a good result. A good percentage of our authors don't understand why they need it until they see the finished book:)

I have to completely agree with the parent comment. I am currently in the final phases of editing a (traditional, printed) book. I originally thought the editorial process would be a breeze (hey, after all I use LaTeX for my typesetting – is there anything beyond that) but... Well, not only has reality proven me wrong, but as the style and editorial correctors give me their comments in writing (I'm writing for my University press), I have had to learn more than a bit in the process.

Very true. Of course, that was not what I meant — Even if I know you are exaggerating a bit with your example, I do know my typesetting basics, and I even thought I knew enough. Talking with the right people made me see how limited my understanding was. And implementing their recommendations taught me more LaTeX than I expected to ever need.

Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely.mobi, which is most compatible among readers).

I have some experience with this as I have produced ~50 professional quality ebooks. I would strongly recommend that you first generate a well-formatted epub. This is an easy format to work with, as it's basically zipped xhtml, and it will also work out-of-the-box with most devices. It's also one of the richest formats when it comes to layout, making it a good basis for converting to other formats.

When you have a proberly formatted epub you can generate a TOC, add metadata and convert to a host of other for

This is true. I'm biased, because I've done some freelance copy editing in the past, but I've caught some really messy mistakes as a proofreader, and this after two or sometimes three other editors. It doesn't matter how good you are, you'll miss some things, and even very skilled editors tend to have blind spots for their own work. I'd never trust myself to be my own copy editor.

Amazon books-especially Kindle books-just as in the iTunes music store uses the "long tail" business model: the vast majority of the products listed make very few, if any, sales. But semi-automated listing, marketing support, royalty aggregation and payment can encourage publication of works that would be too-long bets in the physical world of editing, design, tree-chopping, and trucking copies around the world.

I am quite happy that my young children's work, Spinners, is listed at Amazon for $0.99; it gets

OK I'll pick on you, as no-one seems to have asked this question at all.

Why 99 cents? Why not a round dollar? Please?

It's the age old retail trick, whereby allegedly people will buy something at 9.99 but not 10.00. Seems like nonsense to me, but apparently it works.

Where I live, they have now opened a 99p shop, which is much more popular than the traditional one pound shop for cheap stuff, even though it's actually more annoying to end up with 7 or 8p in coppers as change...

Where I live, they have now opened a 99p shop, which is much more popular than the traditional one pound shop for cheap stuff, even though it's actually more annoying to end up with 7 or 8p in coppers as change...

Around my way, they're actively marketing themselves against the pound shop, as being better value!

They also have huge, supposedly-professionally printed advertising in the windows proclaiming that you get "alot more for your money". This makes me want to go in and try to buy an alot at as a pet, but I suspect their cashiers don't read Hyperbole-and-a-Half...

Not actively necessarily, but their payment scheme certainly pushes people towards a 2.99 price point. At 2.99, you take in 70% or 2.10. At 99 cents you get 1/6th of that. So it's more profit to you to sell 20 copies at 2.99 than 100 at 99 cents and less money for Amazon. Of course, if you're going to sell 6x as many copies or more at 99 cents, then you might as well go 99 cents. It's clearly better to sell 600 copies at 99 cents than 100 at 2.99, since you're going to make the same money, but reach m

It seems to me that the attempts by schools, universities etc. to detect plagiarism would be useful in this area. The problem of course is that plagiarism isn't illegal per se, e.g. if a spammer rips off a source like Wikipedia there's no legal recourse.But it would mean that sites like Amazon would be able to detect these worthless books and put up a warning.

There ought to be a serious business for E-Book Editors out there... providing a certain level of editing quality--perhaps with a graded pay/service model that enables authors to pay for editing services but not break the bank.